Lawmaker proposes grade sharing for state's small schools

January 27, 2009

PIERRE - A Democratic state senator said she's preparing a bill for the 2009 Legislature that could help small schools ease into consolidation. Sen. Julie Bartling of Burke said her legislation would establish ''whole grade sharing,'' which would let neighboring districts share certain grades instead of consolidating the entire school system, she said. Whole grade sharing would help small districts in many ways, she said. ''They would have to share the whole grade, not just one or two kids or shifting of that nature. It's a relatively new concept to South Dakota. It is done in Iowa right now. It saves both districts or however many districts involved ... money, it saves them cost in faculty, it saves them administrative costs, but yet the kids still are able to ... go to a school and be with a nicer-size group of kids and it can offer them some better, fantastic education opportunities,'' Bartling said. The new process would not replace consolidation, but would be a first step that a district could take to ease into the process, she said. ''It softens the blow and it brings things together that the communities involved will be more receptive to and gives them an opportunity to work those things out rather than being just abruptly forced to consolidate,'' said Bartling, who added that she has talked with educators and with state Education Secretary Tom Oster. Oster ''is very receptive to it (and) is actually helping me write the language for the bill,'' she said. ''Of course, once it's drafted, we'll get it back over to him and work with him to refine it, and hopefully the executive branch will be favorable of it as well, seeing it as a way to improve and provide quality education for kids no matter what size school they are and then help save some local dollars for those local school districts and just kind of make things easier for them yet provide the quality education the kids need. ''There are districts out there who find that consolidation is just not the avenue that they can go down at this point in time; they just cannot financially afford to consolidate,'' Bartling said in an interview. ''And I know that's probably hard to understand, but when they do consolidate, they do have some losses of revenue, whether that be from federal funds or just a shift in their faculty and administrative issues and they just have trouble making some of those consolidation programs work.''